Act 2 Mission 2 (Breakthrough Operation) seems impossible..

[HoopJones]

I've lost this mission about 4 times now due to running out of time. It takes ages to kill all the enemy units required to get to all 8 victory hexes secured in 21 turns. I always get near the fortress up top..but there's no way to sweep that entire area in time.

Am I missing something or is this mission just about impossible? I've noted one of the issues is that units can't move properly on this map due to the amount of terrain that gets in the way...but it can take entire turns to kill some of the opposing units that are on or near the hexes; I've tried multiple layouts so far to no avail.

(Also, it doesn't help that assault troops cannot jump across terrain..this is exceptionally anti-fluff and is one of the issues I am having with terrain on this map. I also noted how useless aircraft seems to be in this game)

[Aekar]

For all users who are not at this point in the campaigns:
Take care as spoilers might follow in the replies to this thread.


Which difficulty, and how is your battlegroup composed?

I did it on Hard, but it was in 1.01, so with Titans ; and I did it *just in time*, without any spare action or movement.
The end was an all in charge.

[larryed112]

What a coincidence - just got to this mission, havent tried it yet. I havent got any marines in my army yet, i couldnt bring myself to disband my steel legion infantry. I was wondering whether these act 2 missions would be doable without them.

[HoopJones]

I think I'm on hard difficulty.

I found that multiple basilisks (at least 4-5) and a few deathstrike missiles (2) are necessary to soften up the Squiggoths and Mega Nobz. Aside from that, I ran 2x Furioso dreadnoughts (these seem to work very well..) some Death Company Assault Teams, a termie squad, and 2x Land Raiders. I thought the amount of artillery was a bit overkill, but really I think the problem is that my army constantly becomes bottlenecked at various parts of the map, or bogged down having to fire a massive amount of arty at a few units which can takes turns to avoid heavy casualties; mega nobz are crazy!

So, I think the big issues here are..

1.) Terrain impedes movement a bit too much..there are some weird points in the map where my dreadnoughts can't walk through and I can't figure out why
2.) Units in cover are ridiculously hard to kill sometimes; the last mission in Act 1 requires you to use cover to survive, but it seems a bit OP that Mega Nobz in terrain can withstand 5/6 basilisk shots and still be alive at the end of the turn...not to mention they seem to not care about an IG Superheavy firing directly in their face.
3.) Fog of War/enemy unit shoots first is frustrating. I tried scouting ahead with flyers to supercede the bottlenecking, but I always seem to run into a Grot Mega Tank which 1 shots my flyers..those units seem to be a bit overpowered, and flyers really shouldn't let an enemy unit have the drop on them..they are in the air!
4.) The Assault Troops not being able to cross water is another massive one; I can accept bottlenecking in terrain with too many tanks..but when I purposefully buy multiple jump pack units and foot sloggers to balance out that hinderance and it doesn't work..there's no feasible way to bypass that problem.

Near the end of the map, my army is beat up but still usable..I just have nowhere near enough time to complete this mission. Perhaps cover provides a bit *too* much protection from attacks?

[HoopJones]

What a coincidence - just got to this mission, havent tried it yet. I havent got any marines in my army yet, i couldnt bring myself to disband my steel legion infantry. I was wondering whether these act 2 missions would be doable without them.

I still think IG tanks are useful, but the aforementioned terrain hindrances really make them crap in certain scenarios. However, as far as I can tell Land Raiders seem to outshine even the best IG tanks (save for super heavys..maybe?) especially in regards to durability.

Salamander Command tank = most overlooked unit. Boosting morale passively seems huge!

[Kerensky]

Hi!

If I may make some recommendations, I would definitely point to your difficulty being one of efficiency. It seems you have only really expensive units in your arsenal. Are you using your entire deployment limit? 5 Basilisk and 2 Deathstrikes really eats up the points fast! Those are super high priced units, along side other expensive units such as Dreadnoughts and high end Space Marine teams... can you list your entire force make up?

This scenario has a 21 slot deployment limit.

Personally when I play, I always use up my entire deployment limit. Typically the rationale goes like this:

1. Build a small elite CORE within my CORE. Splurge on maybe 5 or 10 units (depending where you are on the campaign) and buy them to be the best you can make them.
2. Fill out the rest of your slots with low to medium end units. They may seem fragile and weak, but used properly, they are actually extremely efficient units for their costs.

The idea, at least how I play, is that by the time I fill out my entire deployment limit, I still have at least some Points left over for mid mission repair and unit replacement. This ensures that I have maximum variety and flexibility with my CORE force. A little bit of everything to fight the wide variety of Orks that are arrayed against me. Keep in mind that about 40% or 50% of all enemy Ork units in the entire campaign are infantry units, and at least half the time they will be in good cover, so bringing a force efficient at fighting entrenched enemy infantry is important. (That means bringing a lot of your own infantry, especially units with assault weaponry!)

So my low end units serve as the vanguards. They lead the way as scouts, absorb damaging AI counter attacks, acting as a buffer between the Orks and my expensive elite units, and dealing damage the best they can. As they take damage (and they will takes lots of it!), spare points are used to bring them back up to strength.

Last time I played this scenario I had something like...

4 Baneblades of varying models. Probably 1 Baneblade, 1 Shadowsword, 2 Baneswords. I upgraded all of my Act1 Leman Russes to these tanks.
2 Dreadnoughts, both Ultramarine Hellfire Dreadnoughts (that lower price tag on Ultramarine units is really handy!)
2 Land Raider Helios, Ultramarines again. (Dat discount!)
2 Basilisk and 1 deathstrike. Got to have someone to soften targets.
2 High experience vulture gunships that survived Act1. Though looking at my save files later on, I don't think they survived the rest of Act2.
1 Salamander Command (I really like this unit for the exact reason you mentioned!)
And pretty much everyone else was some mix of infantry. Only 1 Rough Rider left of Steel Legion infantry, but all other units were a mix of Blood Angel Space Marine infantry. Mostly assault teams, only 1 Terminator though. 7 Infantry teams in all. More than any other single class of units, and 1/3 of my total force.

This was before 1.02 though, and 1.02 made infantry even better too!

Hope this helps, good luck with this scenario and I look forward to hearing what your force make up was and what you ended up using to defeat this scenario!

[Aekar]

I second that.

Moe combined arms, some infantries ...
I had about 2 Basilisks left in my core once Act 2 began.
I also never could use the Deathstrikes, actually.

Aside from the basilisks, Heavy tanks and an array of faster units was the rest.
Infantries charged in that fortress as my heavy tanks were not fast enough to get to the top, but they helped in shooting that armor stuff, and the infantries finished 1-2 guys and vehicles took that position.
Note that you can resell during deployment for full value


This is one of the missions where the combined arms worked to its best.
Most of Act One does reward that, then (please note that ) about one third of the Act 2 / 3 missions.
This one is among them.
But again, it was in 1.01, 1.02 should bring even more focus to combined arms with vehicles.

[JimmyC]

I found that assault squads are good for this one. The super heavies arent so great as they are slow and bog down. I think i had 4, but could easily have done with just 3. The Hellfire Dreadnought is great though - it really rips through units in h2h and takes little damage in return! I did it on challenging level (1 easier than hard) and finished it first time through, although had to really race in the end - finishing only 1 turn early.

[HoopJones]

Yep..still can't even come close to beating this mission. Getting annoyed. Have wasted about 5 hours trying to beat this crap.

[Kerensky]

Sorry to hear you are struggling so much with this mission. If you continue to have problems with this mobility on this map, have you tried going across the rivers to the side of the first choke point? If all else failes I would recommend trying to lower the difficulty setting. You can always come back later and fight on the higher difficulties!

[HoopJones]

Sorry to hear you are struggling so much with this mission. If you continue to have problems with this mobility on this map, have you tried going across the rivers to the side of the first choke point? If all else failes I would recommend trying to lower the difficulty setting. You can always come back later and fight on the higher difficulties!

There are three massive problems with "going around" early in this map

1.) Assault Squads (which should be able to jump over the rivers) cannot do so, so they get bogged down
2.) Mega Nobz shooting at these units in negative cover will do tons of damage
3.) Any other units that can "fly ahead" to assist are easily mowed down by the units behind the first chokepoint. As stated, my flyer was 1 shot killed by a mega grot tank.

[Plaid]

Huge ork base squad size (why they are larger than even conscripts?) + increased squad size from patch + increased squad size from difficulty level is in general unhealthy combination.

Can hurt in later scenarios aswell.

[HoopJones]

Huge ork base squad size (why they are larger than even conscripts?) + increased squad size from patch + increased squad size from difficulty level is in general unhealthy combination.

Can hurt in later scenarios aswell.

That's an interesting point..the 40 sized shoota boys in the buildings that don't do much damage but take a long time to kill aren't helping either.

[HoopJones]

I think I am going to quit playing this game until someone fixes what makes this a waste of time on harder difficulty.

I've tried at least 5 different loadouts and tactics based on feedback and it's just not possible; I get to the exact same point EVERY single time and then it's over.

Cover is too good, mega nobz are too survivable, and there are a lot of terrain movement modifiers in this game that are frustrating and nonsensical. There's a spot early on in the map that for *no* obvious reason, my dreadnoughts can't enter..so guess what? my entire army holds back because a unit wasted two turns trying to advance in a seemingly logical fashion and was denied.

I found a new (awful) problem terrain wise - the chokepoints at the top of the map are completely blocked off until you kill the Kannons in place, so if you can't kill the opposing unit via ranged damage or a single assault, it blocks the entire forward progression until you kill it. I wasted 2 turns trying to kill a single Kannon because of this.

I get that the game is still being tweaked, but I truly believe there are some massive gameplay problems here and I'd really like for them to be addressed. I don't want to "cheat" in order to advance.

[JimmyC]

Why not turn down the difficulty level? I think hard difficulty and above are only for the very experienced gamers. I recommend challenging level.

My other suggestion is that you shouldnt be afraid to lose units in order to win a scenario. So it may be worth throwing a unit at a roadblock knowing it will die next turn. The way that requisition works, it doesnt penalise you for finishing with 1 unit alive or 20 units alive. In fact, the only benefit of keeping units alive is having experience on them.

[DownTheDrain]

I get that the game is still being tweaked, but I truly believe there are some massive gameplay problems here and I'd really like for them to be addressed. I don't want to "cheat" in order to advance.

While there certainly are some gameplay issues, I'm not sure if having trouble with one particular mission on a higher difficulty qualifies as a "massive problem".

As for cheating, do whatever makes the game more fun for you, as long as it's just singleplayer.
I wanted to play an all marines, mostly infantry campaign so I buffed the hell out of regular Ultramarine units.
So far I'm having a good time and I don't feel bad for messing with the balance at all.

[xela]

Was in the same boat.. keep playing with your Setup, for example those 2 Furioso Dreadnoughts cut through the ork-inf, wouldn't know how to win this Op and all the following ones without em.

Linky to my Setup - https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4mrcjmsf9zmp ... O.jpg?dl=0

[Zonso]

Just finished this on Turn 17, challenging, with a couple pauses along the way to regroup and replenish. I did have to rebuild a Death Company once. The Death Companies, Terminators and Captain Tyco were the main fighting force of my group with everything else pretty much supporting. Because of the constricted terrain and low movement, the Baneblade type tanks were pretty useless in this battle. My force consisted of:

2 x Assault Death Companies
2 x Terminators with Cyclone
2 x Salamander Command
2 x Landraider Helios
1 x Steel Legion Antitank
1 x Steel Legion Fire Support
2 x Basilisks
2 x Deathstrikes
2 x Dreadnoughts
2 x Baneblades
2 x Baneswords
1 x Captain Tyco

[Rmarsden]

I'll update this. I just wanted to share something amusing.

I have come close to beating this one, a turn or two away. A bridge too far as they say. My infantry slog on, my tanks thunder away. Close... and yet.

I read everyone's comments and frowned. How did you get Space Marines?

Hey! On the unit selection there is a spot for that. Time to re-arrange my army and see how this goes. However, my hats off to my Steel Legion, almost all fresh recruits (I got murdered down to 3 units when the SM first arrived) who came so perilously close to glory.

Edit: Wow, very close. From turn 17 I saved because that was right where I arrived at the bridges. I was able to win, but just barely, and it required me to get firepower across the bridges to the hive entry ways as fast as possible. Captain Tycho with a Steel Legion Command unit behind him led one way, and Blood Angel Terminators and a Furioso Dreadnaught the other.

Like others before me, my super-heavy tanks were resilient, but did not take out enemy units quickly as I'd have liked. I'll need suggestions on some good options for taking out Ork heavy armor fast, as well as entrenched Ork heavy infantry fast.

A win-able scenario, but by no means easy. You do have to essentially kill every ork in your path and the map is too narrow for much in the way of fancy maneuvering. For me, it became an issue of being able to kill enemy units swiftly, and always inch forward. You can't afford to sit still in this one!

My army was a mix of various super heavy tanks, a few laser destroyers to support them, mortars, snipers, and the aforementioned lead units.

[Dayta]

Killing Ork Heavy Armor: Shadowswords are actually pretty good at this (and killing titans) and one of the few superheavies truly worth it. Otherwise Laser Destroyers (upgraded) or Land Raider Achilles do well.

Killing Ork Infantry: Try the Land Raider Crusader/Redeemer variants. Both typically kill 20-30 ork infantry, even if not vetted well. Decent vs medium armor too, main problem is range 2. Terminator w/ Assault Cannon Squads are also great, but expensive if you got a transport and lose one. Also snipers never fall out of favor, in the final missions I had 3-4 squads in a challenging run. If it was a higher difficulty there would probably be more.